Housing plans: delivery gap

EDITORIAL: The prime minister’s announcement of yet another housing scheme for low-income groups joins a long line of similar public sector initiatives unveiled with great fanfare over the decades, but few have made any meaningful dent in the country’s worsening housing shortage.

The five-year plan, announced on April 30 and titled ‘Wazir-e-Azam Apna Ghar Programme’ envisions 500,000 homes nationwide at a projected cost of Rs3.2 trillion, with 50,000 units targeted in its first year. While the prime minister has described it as “one of the most significant endeavours” of his tenure, linking it to expanded homeownership while spurring broader economic activity by revitalising industry and commerce, such claims sit uneasily alongside the long record of under-delivery that has defined public-sector housing efforts in the country.

To illustrate just two examples from recent history, the highly ambitious Naya Pakistan Housing Programme launched in 2018 – designed to deliver five million homes – and the 2013 ‘Apna Ghar’ scheme under the previous PML-N government, both fell spectacularly short of their stated goals. Official figures indicate that the ‘Naya Pakistan’ scheme had produced only around 58,000 units by 2025, a tally that also subsumed several pre-existing projects under its umbrella.

The 2013 ‘Apna Ghar’ scheme, which similarly targeted the construction of 500,000 homes for low-income families, fared even worse: despite budgetary allocations running into billions, implementation was virtually non-existent, with negligible disbursements and an overseeing authority that remained largely non-functional. With the country’s history being replete with schemes that have followed much the same trajectory of high ambition and limited delivery, it is difficult, then, to escape the conclusion that affordable housing programmes have functioned more as instruments of political signalling and short-term optics than as sustained policy interventions that genuinely address the housing shortage.

The record of such schemes also suggests a clear gap between ambition and capability. Confronted with an ever-burgeoning population growth rate and rapid, largely unplanned urbanisation, successive governments have struggled to craft responses commensurate with the scale and complexity of the housing challenge.

The result is a deficit estimated at a massive 10-12 million housing units. More fundamentally, it points to a lack of specialised expertise in public sector housing initiatives that are too often shaped by limited policy vision and an incomplete grasp of evolving urban realities by political governments, then executed by a bureaucracy dominated by generalists rather than domain experts.

The outcome is public sector projects characterised by inefficiencies, leakages and at times outright corruption. Meanwhile, the challenge itself grows increasingly complex, requiring housing models that account for climate vulnerability, resource constraints and the unchecked expansion of informal settlements where millions live in shocking conditions, marred by the absence of basic services like clean water, sanitation and reliable electricity, alongside overcrowding, insecure tenure and limited access to stable livelihoods.

While the prime minister’s latest initiative deserves encouragement, one hopes that the government realises that what is needed is a more holistic, disciplined approach to the housing challenge that draws on international best practices, where pressures of rapid population growth, urbanisation and housing shortages have been addressed with some success.

Turkey’s TOKI framework, the state-run housing development administration responsible for delivering social housing in partnership with private contractors, offers one such example. It is not without its shortcomings, particularly in governance and equitable access, yet its record of delivering millions of housing units over the past two decades cannot be dismissed either. Central to drawing lessons from similar models is the need to move beyond bureaucratic ownership of policy design, and to meaningfully incorporate urban planners, housing economists and infrastructure specialists, whose expertise is essential to grounding schemes in the realities of land markets, financing constraints and urban growth dynamics.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026